Which comes first: Smart-grid chicken or e-car egg?

Behind all the encouraging headlines and press releases about so many new electric vehicle charging stations going up here, and so many new plug-in cars entering the market there, the reality is we still have some serious challenges ahead of us if we want to meet our goal of moving away from petrol-fueled transport.

Looked at from a distance, it really does amount to a chicken-and-egg-type problem: which comes first — electric cars or smarter, cleaner energy (since much of the electricity we currently rely on comes from polluting coal power)?

In the US, President Barack Obama has a stated goal of getting 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. As of 2011, the US Department of Energy (DOE) puts the nation’s total supply of electric vehicles at 45,600. Based on its estimates for future production, the supply will hit just over 1.2 million in 2015, which has the country hitting its e-car target.

The big operative word here, though, is supply. What’s available according to what electric-car manufacturers say in their press releases versus what’s actually purchased and put on the road are two different things. (Think of houses on the market versus actual number of home-buyers.) Manufacturing delays have in the past forced car-makers to ratchet down their production forecasts. And even if auto companies do make as many cars as they say they plan to, people still need to buy and use them to make a meaningful dent in the mix of vehicles we see on the road.

The ongoing rise in gas prices will certainly help drive some growth in electric-car adoption. But the question is, by how much? If you’re unemployed or unsure about the stability of your job, what are you more likely to do when fillups start hurting your household budget: invest in a plug-in car or carpool/take public transportation/walk?

And then there’s the charging question: assuming we hit our electric-vehicle goals, will we have enough charging stations to support them?

The DOE just announced that stimulus funds have so far led to the installation of more than 1,800 electric-vehicle charging stations across the country. Using $400 million in Recovery Act funding, the Transportation Electrification Inititiative aims to have in place more than 13,000 grid-connected vehicles and more than 22,000 charging points by the end of 2013. The DOE describes it as the “world’s largest electric vehicle demonstration project.”

Europe has similarly ambitious goals, though it’s considerably ahead of the US in both electric-car use and charging infrastructure, with just under 10,000 public charging stations as of 2010, according to a recent report from Frost & Sullivan. Spurred largely by government incentives, that figure will grow rapidly to nearly 2 million public charging points across the EU by 2017, the report predicts. In the UK alone, some 60 per cent of new cars and vans are expected to be electric by 2030, according to the latest estimate from the Committee on Climate Change.

At the heart of all this ambition, of course, lies the question of electricity supplies. If we achieve our plug-in car goals, if we built the charging infrastructure needed to support it in time … we also need to be assured of adequate power supplies. That means we’ll need far smarter energy grids on both sides of the pond: ageing systems are already causing a steady rise in outages in the US, while the UK is facing the prospect of shutting down older, polluting power plants to meet EU emissions reduction standards.

That’s one tangled web. While we seem to be making progress with the various threads so far, weaving them all together successfully will be another matter.